Microbial Contamination and Atmospheric Loadings of Nutrients to Land and Water

The development of ecological forecasts, namely, methodologies, to predict the chemical, biological, and physical changes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems is desirable so that effective strategies for reducing the adverse impacts of human activities and extreme natural events can be developed to sustain ecosystem productivity. The temporal and spatial scales of such ecological forecasts, in turn, depend on the ecosystem and the phenomenon being forecast. Since the development of comprehensive monitoring programs for ecological assessments and forecasting is expensive, scientists and environmental managers would need to increasingly rely on theoretical models for understanding nutrient effects and forecasting trends.1 Systems that include detailed descriptions of the pathways dictating the fate and transport of nutrients and contaminants from a combined atmosphere–land–water perspective are needed for integrated ecological assessments. Such systems must be able to accurately describe not only the cycling and residence time of contaminants in the individual media, but also the interactions from an integrated multimedia perspective. Significant efforts have been devoted over the past two decades toward the development of detailed models to address specific ecological problems. In recent years, several such efforts have been transitioned to provide short-term forecast of air and water quality. Linking the information from these evolving modeling systems could provide the building blocks for next-generation integrated ecological forecast models. Additionally, the development of continual archives of the model output from these systems could provide a vital long-term database, which, in conjunction with available monitored data, will help better characterize both shortand long-term responses of key ecological variables on spatial scales, ranging from local to continental.